Most CCTV goes in like this: someone walks the property, decides where the cameras go, and installs them. The client sees the result when it is finished and the cable is in the wall.
There is a much better step available, and it costs almost nothing. Draw it first. Send it to them. Ask them to argue with it.
What the drawing needs on it
Two things, in two colours:
- What each camera will actually see — the estimated viewing angle, drawn onto the site plan as a cone from each proposed position.
- Where the cable and conduit will run — the physical route, so people can see what will be dug, chased or boxed in.
That is it. It does not need to be a professional CAD drawing. A site plan, marked up clearly, with a note explaining what the colours mean.
The viewing angles are the important half. A dot on a plan saying “camera here” tells the client nothing they can evaluate. A cone showing what that camera covers — and, by omission, what it does not — turns the plan into something a non-technical person can genuinely check.
Why the client is the right reviewer
This is the part installers underrate.
On the project this article draws on, the drawing went to all the owners of a small residential complex with an open invitation to suggest alternatives. Two replies came back, and they were completely different in kind.
One owner said, in effect: this is not my field, I will be guided by you. Which is a perfectly reasonable answer and the one most clients give.
The other owner looked at the cones properly and noticed that coverage did not appear to reach the far ends of two rows. She then made the point that mattered: those particular units were the more exposed ones, for a reason to do with the property’s layout that the drawing alone would not tell you — and asked whether the cameras could be angled to take in more of that area.
That is a coverage gap, on the more vulnerable part of the property, found before installation, by a resident, from a picture.
No installer has that knowledge. You can survey a property thoroughly and still not know which corner people worry about, where somebody was followed home, which fence gets climbed, or which end unit feels exposed. The people who live there know all of it. They simply have no way to contribute it until you show them something they can react to.
A drawing converts the client from a spectator into a reviewer. That is its real function.
The questions it surfaces are not only technical
The same reply raised two more points that had nothing to do with camera angles: a monitor proposed for one particular unit — who was paying for it — and what “access to recordings” would actually mean in practice.
Both are excellent questions and both are governance rather than engineering. On a shared system, one household receiving equipment the others do not, or one household having access to footage of everyone’s approach, are decisions the whole group should make knowingly.
They surfaced because there was a document to react to. Circulating a plan does not just check the coverage — it flushes out the assumptions that would otherwise be discovered after handover, when they are much harder to unwind.
While the trench is open
One more thing the cabling half of the drawing earns, and it is worth mentioning because it is a decision that can only be made once.
On this project the conduit was buried where possible and made good afterwards. Alongside it, a spare oversized conduit was run across the driveway, with wall-mounted junction boxes at the ends.
Nothing went in it. That was the point. The next time anything needs a cable across that driveway — another camera, an intercom, a gate controller, a network link to an outbuilding — it pulls through the spare rather than requiring the driveway to be cut open, made good and paid for again.
The cost of that conduit while the trench is already open is trivial. The cost of the same route in three years is a day of excavation, a concrete repair that never quite matches, and an argument about who authorised it.
If you are digging anything, put a spare in. It is the highest-return decision in the whole installation and it is invisible on the finished job.
How to run the review
- Mark the plan with viewing cones and cable routes, in two clear colours, with a key.
- Send it to everyone affected, not just whoever signs. On a shared property that means all households.
- Ask a direct question. Not “any comments?” — ask “is there anywhere you are worried about that this does not cover?” That question gets answers; the open one does not.
- Expect most people to defer, and treat the one person who engages as valuable rather than difficult.
- Confirm the final positions on site before anything is mounted. The drawing is the review; the walk is the sign-off.
- Record what was agreed, including anything deliberately not covered and why. That decision will be questioned later, and the honest answer — “we discussed it and chose not to” — is a good one only if it is written down.
The short version
The cheapest quality control in CCTV is a marked-up plan sent to the people who live or work there, with an invitation to find the gaps.
They will find some. That is not embarrassing — it is the process working, at the only stage where fixing it costs nothing.
Based on a 2013 progress thread from a shared CCTV installation at a small residential complex. The property, its owners and the drawing are not published; the drawing shows coverage on an identifiable site and is withheld permanently. Practice conclusions are offered from experience, not as a standard.